Incentives & Logistics

This article has been published on March 22nd at SS&M Soundoff Blog from ManageSmarter.com

After many years in the incentives & relationship marketing industry, one idea is fixed in my mind: it doesn’t matter which is the goal/strategy/rewards of your campaign or program, if you haven’t arranged (really organized) all the logistics related to it.

I have been managing incentives campaigns since 2002 for international companies like Toyota, GE, BP, Nestle, KODAK, FUJITSU-SIEMENS,…and the main obstacle in all this projects were the logistics ones. You can prepare extraordinary strategies, new ways to communicate the program (emailing, sms messages, newsletters,…), and the newest rewards at the incentive scheme, but finally the customer, employee, the PARTICIPANT in the program has to receive the REWARD.

Finding the proper logistics partner is probably one of the most important decisions previously to any other marketing action. I’ve been working with several partners: logistics companies, marketing agencies with integrated logistics services, purchasing agents,…and my conclusion is that there is one solution for each kind of project/company. You have to detect what will be your logistics needs for the related development, and after this analysis, you can select the appropriate partner. It’s not the same to send gift cards to your sales force in several locations than manage a 150 reference gift catalogue with participants located all over the country.

There are some key points you have to notice when you select the logistics partner:
- Experience in incentives
- Delivery options. 24 hours, international,…
- Online Package tracking
- Call Centre
- Warehouse capacity

Developing a successful incentive program is directly related with this partner choice. Of course you can´t ignore the conception of the right strategy to afford your objectives, designing the different ways to communicate the program, and also the selection of rewards. I will talk about these other pieces of an incentive program in others articles.

Finally one suggestion: Don’t try to do it yourself, never. You must trust in professionals, marketing agencies, independent advisors, logistics partners, rewards specialists, … I have seen a lot of "sales tragedies" because someone thought “...We can do it by ourselves...”, and they created the opposite to a loyalty/incentive program: objectives without strategies, out of stock rewards, logistics troubles, and at the end irritate customers/employees, I label them as “the unincentived”.

Technorati Tags: incentives, logistics, rewards, motivation, sales force